E-mu Audity

Only one Audity ever came off the assembly line. It is a state of the
art computer based analog synthesizer commissioned by ex-Tangerine
Dreamer Peter Baumann in 1979. It came at a time when E-mu, like other
synth manufacturers of the time, were making a move towards producing an
instrument that was more compact and more advanced than the purely
analog modular beasts they had been making. Under pressure from synths
like Sequential's Prophet-5, E-mu set out to
make a very powerful analog synth. The Audity was a 16-voice instrument
with a massive amount of programmability and stability thanks to the
computer based technology that controlled it.

Unfortunately the instrument was so expensive ($70,000) that nobody
wanted to buy one. It was also a bear to program. E-mu wound up shelving
it in order to start over with a new concept inspired by the Fairlight. This led to a
sophisticated and much cheaper sampler - the Emulator 1. But the Audity had not been
forgotten by E-mu. Much of the Audity's multi-timbral design went into
the creation of the sample-playback Proteus
synthesizers, which in turn paved way for the Audity 2000 sound module!

The one and only
living Audity is currently in a synthesizer gallery at the CANTOS Music
Foundation in Calgary, Alberta Canada. It was never actually completed, so
it has never actually worked. As such, it remains a truly one-of-a-kind
show-piece of what could have been - the synthesizer equivalent of a concept-car.

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